Originally posted by Ratmagiclady "About the only thing you can do with a manual film camera that you can't do with a digital camera is shoot film, and I don't think that is going to prove to be enough. Certainly the manufacturers of manual film cameras don't seem to think so. They've gotten out of the film camera business, leaving them as a rump product for smaller manufacturers who also don't seem to be making very many of them.
I just had a look at the Cosina website. They are advertising a few rangefinder bodies, but no SLRs."
They also make... A profit.
They issued a *screwmount* body for a few years, and *sold them out, too,* and that's while most folks can have a screwmount body that still works off Ebay.
One thing you can do with a film camera that you cannot with a digital is: make something permanent with your own hands.
Coffee grounds and vinegar, if you have to.
You think someone a hundred years from now is gonna dig up your high-performance Mac, make it run, and find their heritage there?
I can't even read my *Word* files from the Nineties.
Digital's lovely for a lot of things, and a practical necessity in others, but it's not the be all and end all of photography.
You never know what's going to be important later.
The world's more photographed than ever in history, but...
How many archival hardcopies are being made?
Good points all, and I'm hoping that us B&W users don't have to devolve to using coffee grounds as developer, but that isn't going to do much for the colour film user who needs mechanized processing.
That roll of film isn't especially permanent images if you can't get them developed.
As an aside, have you tried to get some of those old oversized negatives from the 20s and 30s printed lately?
We can't find a source for printing them so we scan them on a flatbed.
Great for us, OK for anyone who owns a film capable scanner, not so good for the other 99.9% of the world.
Most people aren't as savvy about this stuff as those of us who hang out on camera forums, and our population is relatively small, as is any enthusiast group compared to the total population.
And frankly, in a hundred years, I have very strong doubts that any of my colour negatives will be printable, even if the technology is available to produce prints, and if anyone is so foolish as to want to see what my dogs looked like.
If film SLRs (and film cameras in general) were so profitable, they would still be in production. I don't know about the low end Nikon (which is a Chinese clone of someone else's knock off anyway). Someone may still be making it.
I do know that the manufacturer (Cosina) isn't listing any SLR cameras on their website.
At least I think Cosina was the manufacturer of the FM-10, I could be wrong.
The F6 was never meant to be a profit maker, and from what I've been told by the guys at my local shop, the last ones rolled off the line in October. I've been told that the top end Canon is out of production as well.
Note also that Pentax no longer makes any film cameras, and Sony mysteriously decided to not continue making Maxxum film cameras when they bought Minolta from Konica, who also couldn't salvage anything usable from Minolta's film camera line, though they killed themselves trying.
Film cameras still profitable?
The people who make them just don't seem to agree with you.
As far as whats on various websites, the 60-250/4 and 55/1.4 are listed on Pentax Canada's website, but I'm not seeing them as available, so who knows?
A few years ago I tried to order an FA*200/4 Macro. It was on PCI's website, but the rep himself told me it wasn't available through Pentax any longer (though he did manage to find me one, bless his Kazzy little head).
It seems apparent that a website listing does not necessarily translate into available products though.
Has anyone tried to order an EOS1 lately?
If you had updated your word files from the 90s as new software became available, you would still be able to read them, BTW.
Or, had you used Corel instead of MS, you'd be OK as well. I can still read my WPD files from the late 90s, and my RTF files are still parsable as well.
People who choose to not update their file formats to be readable with existing software, or who don't keep legacy software/hardware available are having trouble, and this is going to affect a lot of people, not just casual snapshooters. Some of us know enough to transfer our files into non proprietary forms, some don't.
You want to keep a word document forever without worry? Maybe make it into a text file or an RTF. The formatting will be gone, but the message will remain. At least they have cross platform/software vendor support.
The same with image files.
We all hate jpegs, but I bet that is a format which will stand the test of time. Or BMPs. They should be readable until the sun goes Nova as well.
OTOH, the camera maker's proprietary format is a very bad risk, and things like DNG are only somewhat less risky.
Kodak had a slogan for a while that went something like "If you haven't got a picture, you haven't got the picture".
And that is so true. My family's history before me is tied up in old photo albums and boxes of pictures. My own childhood faded into history along with the Ektachrome slides that my father shot, which faded out long before I reached middle age. My own childhood is lost, all that remains are clear pieces of celluloid in cardboard frames.
Real photographs can fade as well, you see, so in a hundred years, it may not matter if you were shooting film or digital, the results may well be the same.
In fact, the digital pictures may be better off.